Is Cuba allowing itself to become a Russian colony?

From our Bureau of Crony Communism and Latrine American Voodoo Economics

As we’ve been saying here at Babalu, this week’s visit by Russia’s foreign minister was another clear sign that Castro, Inc. is cozying up to Grand Putinia in its usual parasitic way.

As a first step in establishing a new relationship, Foreign Minister Lavrov announced that Castro, Inc. and Russia have already agreed on how to “restructure” (read “forgive”) Cuba’s massive debt.

The question now is whether Russian “economists” who are advising Castro, Inc. on economic reforms really have anything to offer other than turning Cuba into a Russian colony. All signs seem to point in that direction.

An article in Diario de Cuba raises some penetrating questions and argues that the weirdest thing about this sudden dependence on Russian crony capitalists is that the economic models with which they are familiar could never be adopted in Cuba, due to its abject poverty, backwardness, and lack of resources.

In an interview posted on CubaNet, Manolo González Moscote warns that Russia is “seeking an economic conquest of Cuba.” Go HERE for that interview, in Spanish)

Abridged from Diario de Cuba

While it is difficult to imagine what kind of advice the Stolypin Club economists could give the Cuban government, suspicions are aroused about a relationship at the moment that is more media than concrete, which only seems to herald a worrying acclimatization of the “Russian model” to the tropical context, due to Castroism. dying, but capable of anything to maintain power.

However, today the conditions on the Island do not seem ripe to accommodate a Russian-type “crony capitalism”, which derived from a previous state, the USSR, intensely industrialized, which, although archaic, was able to insert itself into the world market at a blow. to reduce labor costs and privatize for pennies what was worth millions.

In addition, since the Soviet economy stagnated in the 1970s due to its inability to innovate, the communist empire developed an extractivist sector, mainly oil, which Russia inherited and Putin re-statized, which provides the Kremlin with independent income from the rest of the economy.

Cuba cannot follow that course, firstly because it does not have enough natural resources to be state-owned and because the State lives with its back to general economic activity; Secondly, because, although some industries can be privatized, what is left is so scarce, worn out and obsolete that there is very little to distribute, apart from the hotel plant, to form a legion of oligarchs all at once, something that would be, for other hand, very difficult to digest politically. In short, the “Russian model” does not seem to be extrapolated to Cuba.

Nor is it that Stolypin’s economists are vanguards in modern economic science and development theory, or have the academic pedigree to be for Cuba what the economic model of the Chicago School was for Chile and China.

It is absurd, if not insulting, that hundreds of studies by resident and exiled Cuban economists, made with the most modern tools of that science, rot ignored by a government that now seeks advice from Russian economists, who are very capitalist and totally unaware of island reality. It’s all very weird and confusing.

Whole story HERE in Spanish